Tyntesfield house has a bell-pull system to call servants. At the foot of the servant’s stairwell each bell is labelled with its location. I was surprised to see that nearly all the bells are the same size and shape.

They sound the same, they look the same.

Servants had to look at the bell moving then read the room description beneath to work out where they should go.

It’s not what I was expecting. When you open the door to a stranger they normally introduce themselves or ask if some named person is in the house. We held each other’s gaze while I tried to work out what he was referring to, before moving us on

can I help you?

is Nicky in? I meant your nose

Was my nose bleeding? I ran my forefinger under my nostrils then inspected my hand. No blood or snot.

NICKY! SOMEONE at the door FOR YOU

He wore blue jeans, a Pringle jumper and a padded anorak that could have been picked up in a Marks and Spencer’s sale. Short back and sides, clean shaven, the boy lacked visual charisma. He looked comfortably middle class, visually unoffensive. Then it dawned on me that my nose-piercing probably made me unique amongst the people he talked to. Nicky was conservative with both a big and little c. She had already given me the benefit of her expertise on the painfully clashing colours of my dress, my unsuitable hair and recommended that I drop my friends because they risked being unsuccessful in life. They could drag me down.

Life. If she didn’t have one, she couldn’t fail. She was on-track for a Pharmacy degree, a husband, car, kids and holidays abroad. It didn’t map to my idea of life then. It doesn’t now.

This is my Butler sink. The Butler sink got its name from the role of the main user. The Butler of the household would use the Butler sink. As I talked to kitchen suppliers they all corrected me when I called this a Butler sink, no, its a Belfast sink. A quick online search tells me that Butler is the generic word for the sinks and Belfast describes more specific features, in this case a ‘wier’ style water overflow. This website describes how city names became associated with the design, and why different cities had different designs:

This is because, when butler sinks were first made in the late 17th century, each major city had a sanitation officer autonomously responsible for the ordering of pipes, basins, sinks, and decreeing sizes, styles etc. Different patterns were evolved and gave rise to specific types. Hence the Belfast butler sink was different from, say, the London butler sink.

Belfast, with access to plentiful water housed sinks with overflows, but London , built on clay where deep wells had to be drilled to reach water, discouraged water wastage and no overflows were accommodated. Therefore, the Belfast butler sink has what is known as a Weir overflow built into it, whereas a standard Butler Sink doesn’t

Just around the corner from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden is this fabulous row of antique communication devices. Many people 20 and under will never ever have used these. Why would they need to? They carry their own phones with them. In the 80’s a row of phone boxes like this in a city centre would have a person in each box talking and maybe one or two people outside, checking the change in their purses, waiting for their turn to make a private call.

According to this history, in the 1980’s most homes didn’t have landline phones.

In 1987, the post office, who deployed and maintained them, systematically replaced these red boxes with a more modern design with more glass and open to the air that reduced the likelihood of the box being used as a urinal, or the subsequent pungent smell. Pew! I remember the smell! Some villages protested against the replacement and managed to hold-on to this much loved older design. But sadly, most red boxes were removed.

I guess they are still useful to a few people for actually hosting a landline call, they are also useful for keeping warm, dry and quiet for making a mobile phone call. It’s wonderful that the local council, as many councils in tourist areas, have decided to leave them here and maintain them in such good condition. For the tourists, and people like me who can be heard bubbling

Recently the on-site health and safety police visited our work premises. They highlighted some of the more dangerous areas of our everyday practices. This device was cited as a potential risk due to an inadequate warning label.

This is often the first question that I’ll ask the wait-staff at the door of a restaurant* in England. Many, probably most, English restaurants use a booking system where you phone the restaurant in advance and book a table for your party. In my early adulthood, I came to understand that if a restaurant accepted walk-ins that meant it wasn’t good-enough to attract sufficient custom to warrant a booking system. A restaurant worth avoiding. Promoting scarcity is an established purchase persuasion technique, for example, think of how airlines will often say ‘only one seat left at this price’.

Restaurants that accept walk-ins are becoming more common in England, reflecting the more American style of first-come, first-served, or take a ticket and wait inline. When I first moved to the US I found the fact that you had to queue to get into many good quality restaurants a somewhat irritating pactice. I never really got used to it. I find fun in the notion of booking a good meal with the company of good friends, several weeks in advance, adds to the excitement and anticipation. Being able to walk straight into a restaurant knowing you are going to be seated and fed in a reasonable time is also a very pleasing experience. Both the restaurant and the customer are being respectful of each others resource management, as customer, this is a good use of my time.

* this use of the term restaurant excludes Pubs, Cafe’s and chain eateries with a substantial US presence such as Yo! Sushi, TGI Fridays, Wagamama…

Painted above the door of many old English pubs is a sign indicating that they are licenced to sell liquors. The licensing system was introduced in the mid 16th century. Licensing for Beer and Wine was distinct from Liquor licensing. Normally coaching Inns, places attracting wealthier customers than the beer and ale houses, were licensed to sell Liquor.

I liked this sign because it specified that the selling was by retail, pressumably as opposed to wholesale. With the ability to take the Liquor off the premisis purchasers might be tempted to purchase for illegal resale or big parties, effectively wholesale.

My secondary school used to have a cloak room, rows of hooks for coats, jackets and gym bags. No cloaks. But if we wore cloaks we would have been able to hang them there. Unlike the cloak room signed here. In these cloakrooms there is a sink, toilet, towell and one of those plastic-bag lined bins.

A TOILET! I’m gradualy getting acclimated to the UK where toilet is not a naughty word. Love it!

Luckily the Wendy House is out of the current glis glis play grounds and if they do come here I wont be spending a fortune on pest control services to remove them, I’ll just put the fluff balls in the attic for a wee bit of fun every now and then.

We came. We Swooped. We are camping. is the slogan on the bottom of Robin Parr’s ‘climate camp’ blog post. This Bank Holiday weekend there is a climate change protest in London. It’s a very British form of protest. Camping. It’s a protest against capitalism. From their site:

the Climate Exchange is the system’s European stock market – must be exposed for the dangerous global financial game which it is. Carbon trading has not and will not reduce emissions. It simply makes corporations richer and allows governments to put on a charade that they are doing something about climate change.

A blog post on the Guardian cites the ‘Whitechapel Anarchist Group’ as complaining about the event, not because the cause is inappropriate but because the the protesters are inappropriate:

“many of the protesters at the camp are middle class students and graduates who are about as revolutionary as the Scouts“

Wendy: yes, only once several months ago, its grown a lot and kept a very good shape, it was a good cut

HBO: yes, I remember. Lucia, the Phillipino lady, cut your hair really short. She’s in the Phillipines as the moment, she owns a bed and breakfast there and its their peak season, its alright for some!

HBO: your scalp is a bit sensitive, do you have a stressful job?

Wendy: (giggles) Sort of because…(unpublishable)

While the assistant washes my way-past-its-cut-by-date mop the HBO checks her records.

We talked about her business, she hasn’t been hit by the credit crisis because ‘everyoneneeds a haircut’ and her business has been established for over 9 years. We both agreed that we liked Reading a lot because of the nice people we’ve met here. She was born in Reading, studied in London with Vidal Sassoon, travelled the world then came back to Reading to set-up her business.

At Darlington train station I walked up to a man stood by a driverless taxi

Wendy: Are you the Taxi driver?

Scottish Taxi Driver (STD): Yes, Flower

Iâ€™m still not used to these gender specific addresses, this one made me smile. He had a broad Scottish accent which my year of living in Scotland has taught me to understand. On our journey the Taxi driver tells me stories. Each story illustrated how ignorant, overly wealthy, and offensive American people are. Stories included being a Jungle warfare trainer based in Malaysia , training the young US troops before they went into Vietnam.

STD: â€¦they had NO idea, they turned up with their scented soap, their radiosâ€¦

In another story a US soldier was bossing him around in a bar, calling him â€˜Boyâ€™ and giving him orders as if the American was superior in some way. One of the orders was to take the Americans travellers cheque for $200 to a currency shop, cash it and return the cash to the American. Can you guess what happened? The cabbie took the cheque, cashed it and never returned to the bar. The cabbie was keen to reassure me that he was not normally a thief but that US soldier needed to be taught a lesson.

Lampost, traffic bollard and paltry gewgar thing topped by a stone carving of a pineapple and decorated with the fasces symbol (ax and bound birch sticks) of strength through authority.

a local landmark

Originally commissioned in 1804 by Edward Simeon, director of the Bank of England, to provide light for the Reading Market and act as an oversized traffic bollard for wayward wagons. Also described as a pawltry gewgaw thing contrived to gain votes for Edward Simeon’s brother in Reading MP elections.

Locally it is more commonly referred to as the ‘Soane Monument’ after the locally residing, now dead, architect, Sir John Soane, who designed both it and the Bank of England. The monument is currently all clean and pretty because it was restored in 2007.

I confess to be in search of an image that somehow captures my archetype, stereotype, of the US. The unexported America, not the internationally spread coffee houses, fast food chains, cans and bottles of soft drinks. The image must capture something of what is and something of aspirational. I doubt my photographic skills will adequately capture and convey this image, if it exists. Here is a placeholder that caught part of the my archetype.

It captures the styling of the classic red pick-up truck and the white picket fence. I rarely saw them in the UK where box hedges appear to be the territory border marker of choice.

The overhead lines, on tilted poles, are seemingly ubiquious. What’s missing from this picture?

A ‘prince of quacks’ in Queen city. Dr. Roy Pierce’s medical elixia appears to be an exemplar of ‘medical quackery’. He created, marketed and patented the ingredients of a range of ‘medical’ products. There is a wonderful humour in the well-maintained barn-painted advertisement for this phenomena (medicine quack) of the wild-west.

A survey of 28,000 people from 27 countries conducted by the BBC World Service asked respondents to indicate whether each of 12 countries had either a negative or positive influence on the world. The USA is perceived as having a negative influence on the world. NPR prints an Associated Press news release on the survey results, in rank-order for perceived negative influence:

51% perceive United States having a negative influence & 30% a positive influence.

When ranking by positive influence Canada is ranked highest (54%) followed by Japan and France. The article cites Prof. Steven Kull hypotheizing the reasons for this result “people around the world tend to look negatively on countries whose profile is marked by the pursuit of military power… …Countries that relate to the world primarily through soft power, like France and Japan and the EU in general, tend to be viewed positively”

soft power (information as arguments) as opposed to hard power (weapons as arguments)

SMART WATER perks up your grey matter and can end random bouts of ignorance and absentmindedness with just one gulp. SMART WATER. You know it makes sense. If you don’t know it makes sense, you must be stupid so buy SMART WATER now and solve your stupidity. Give it to your children, your pets, your granny… …we all need a little more smarts every now and then, you can rely on SMART WATER to solve all your ignorance challenges.

In the United Kingdom, although two minutes’ silence is observed on November 11 itself, the main observance is on the second Sunday of November, Remembrance Sunday. Ceremonies are held at local communities’ War Memorials, usually organized by local branches of the Royal British Legion â€“ an association for ex-servicemen. Typically, poppy wreaths are laid by local organisations including the Royal British Legion, ex-servicemen organisations, cadet forces, the Scouts, Guides, Boys’ Brigade, St John Ambulance and the Salvation Army. “The Last Post” is played by a trumpeter or bugler, two minutes’ silence is observed and broken by a trumpeter playing “Reveille”. A minute’s or two minutes’ silence is also frequently incorporated into church services on that day. The main commemoration is held in Whitehall in central London, where the Queen, Prime Minister, and other senior political and military figures join with veterans to lay wreaths at the Cenotaph.

pie-dropping disappointment reigned on our US roadtrip when the place matt under the pie dish declared that the local Swedish Festival in small town Pennsylvania had finished before we arrived. As a self-confessed Viking, I was disappointed to miss the pillaging and:

“Hair, it seems, had been a very important social and religious issue throughout all of the history of mankind, especially since many ancient superstitions revolved around it… …In 1308, the worldâ€™s oldest barber organisation, still known in London as the â€œWorshipful Company of Barbersâ€ was founded… …By the end of the 18th century, most barbers had given up their rights to perform surgery, except in small towns where surgeons were not available. They lost their status and became labourers, fashioning wigs in the 18th and 19th century, and their shops became shady hangouts……the art of barbering was revived in 1893 when A. B. Moler established a school for barbers in Chicago. Several years before, in 1886, the Barbersâ€™ Protective Union had been founded in Columbus, Ohio, which eventually became Journeymen Barber’s International on December 5, 1887. In 1897, the State of Minnesota passed the legislation for a barber licence.“

In the 1970’s the English barber shops were still supplying their customers with “A little something for the weekend“. Their exclussively male clients could avoid the embarressment of going into a chemist* to ask for ‘french letters’ over the counter where the shop assisstant might be neither male nor discrete and other customers may overhear the request. That’s very embaressing. Barbers are discrete and approving of your opportunity to use the french letters. How do I know this? Let’s just say ‘word of mouth’ 😉

Aha, I've been busy
Buying presents, flights, travelling, packing and unpacking. No time for romance or blogging.
Recently the crush was crushed. I rather fancy another crush. Meanwhile, gorgeous friends, like the...